Children's fiction

Briar Rose

by Jane Yolen

241 pages · First published 1992

Rebecca Berlin, a young Jewish woman in modern America, has been raised on her grandmother Gemma’s unusual version of Sleeping Beauty. After Gemma’s death, Rebecca follows the clues embedded in the fairy tale to Poland and discovers that the story encoded memories of the Holocaust. The search leads toward Chełmno and a history her grandmother could only communicate through transformed images of castles, sleep, and awakening. Jane Yolen’s novel uses fairy-tale structure to connect family memory and Holocaust history, showing how stories can preserve traumatic truth even when they alter its literal form.